


To Carthage Then I Came

by Annakovsky



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Clone Sex, Clones, F/M, Incest, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-22
Updated: 2005-10-22
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:46:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annakovsky/pseuds/Annakovsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clones of Mulder's sister Samantha are being terminated. Mulder tries to save them.</p><p>WARNING: Incest, more or less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Carthage Then I Came

Mulder has been on the run for years when the file appears outside his hotel room door, a plain manila folder with his name on the front. It's upsetting to know he's that easy to find, and he immediately leaves to go further underground, deeper undercover. Oklahoma, this time, or Nebraska. But the information in the folder is so intriguing he's glad, even so, that it got to him.

The file contains information on fifteen clones of his sister Samantha, clones of varying ages, scattered throughout the country. He flips through it in a trashy diner at 2 am, fluorescent lights dull above him, his heart pounding. Some are as old as Samantha would be if she had lived. Some are still children. He sees in their pictures the Samanthas that would have been, that he never knew. A 12 year old, with braces and too long arms and legs. A college student, young and pretty. A grown woman, kids of her own.

The note inside with the files is handwritten. _This project has been terminated_, it says. _You know what that means._

He immediately sets out to rescue them.

The first two he tries, Indianapolis and Milwaukee, he's too late. He begins to worry that none of them are still alive, that all he will find is bloodstains and grieving families. Then he gets to Cincinnati, the suburbs. A little girl, four years old, plays in her yard, rides a tricycle up and down the driveway. He spends a few hours just watching, knowing that if he doesn't do it, she will be as good as dead, summoning up his courage.

So he kidnaps her. He actually offers her candy, feeling ridiculous, getting his criminal plans from PSAs on Saturday morning TV. But it works - she climbs in the car and they drive away. She is exactly as he remembers Samantha at four - brown hair in pigtails, absolutely fearless. They're far away before anyone notices she's missing, and he knows how missing child investigations go, knows how to avoid the roadblocks and search teams. She was a foster child anyway, no one much will care that she's gone.

Her name is Megan, and she holds his hand without prompting when they get to a motel, the kind of place where nobody notices anything as a matter of policy. Megan listens carefully with big eyes as he explains to her that he came to rescue her, because some bad men wanted to hurt her.

"Are you my real dad?" she asks at the end of his explanation. He pauses, uneasy, before deciding it will be easier and nodding. "Where's my mom?" she asks.

"Uh...," he says. "She died." And this becomes their story. They change their names as they travel from place to place, trying to find the other Samanthas. In between, he pretends to be Samantha's (Megan's) father. At a playground in Dallas, a single mother strikes up a conversation with him. When she asks how Samantha's mother died, Mulder says, "Cancer," without pausing to think. He blinks at himself, then nods slowly and says, "My wife Dana had an inoperable nasal-pharyngeal tumor."

Somewhere Scully is raising their son without him. Every so often she mails pictures to one of the many post office boxes he has around the country, and he goes to get them in dark glasses and a baseball cap. Samantha-Megan-this-week-Jessica accompanies him, but he hides the pictures from her. Too many questions. John Doggett's name appears in these letters more often than he would like, taking William to the zoo, the park, story-time at the public library. He wants to ask Scully if she and Doggett are sleeping together, but he never does.

In Phoenix they find another live Samantha, eight years old. He wonders if she likes Stratego, and the guilt hits him so strong it takes a second to catch his breath. The assassins get there at nearly the exact time he does, and Mulder has to kill a man before he gets her away. It's not hard. By the time they get back to Samantha 1, whom he'd left with the old woman across the hall, Samantha 2 - Lily, he tells himself, her name is Lily - has absorbed the facts. He tells her more of the truth, but not all of it - they will pretend he is her dad, so they can hide from the bad men. When they get back to the hotel room, Mulder carefully wipes the blood spatters from Samantha 2's face before they pick up Samantha 1.

Samantha 1 (not Samantha - Megan, damn it) is beginning to forget she ever had a life other than this - on the run, moving from place to place, changing names, clothes, hair colors. She is bright and happy - she colors and watches Sesame Street and likes chocolate ice cream.

Samantha 2 - Lily - is quieter, subdued. She has nightmares about what happened the night Mulder found her, dreams about blood and guns. When she wakes up like that, he gets her a glass of water from the hotel bathroom, padding in his bare feet, and holds her hand until she calms down and goes back to sleep.

He is feeling less and less awkward being a fake parent. He automatically cuts up Samantha 1's meat at restaurants, asks them if they need to use the bathroom before they leave the house, zips up their jackets. Buys juice boxes and fruit roll-ups.

He is down to his last file of the fifteen after six months of this, a woman in San Francisco the same age as his sister should be. Maybe that's why he saved her until last - he expects it to be hard. Well, he expects her to be dead - 12 out of the previous 14 were, after all. When he sees her walk out of her apartment building, it's like seeing a ghost - she looks just like the woman the cigarette smoking man had brought him in a diner so many years before.

Her he tells the whole truth, the cloning, the termination. Well... nearly the whole truth. He doesn't tell her Samantha was his sister. He's not quite sure why.

Her name is Jill, and she joins them on the run. The Lone Gunmen get them all new identities, permanent ones, so the kids can be in school. He is Craig Benson; she's his wife Amy. Their daughters are Madeline and Celia. Craig Benson works for an insurance company in Atlanta - Madeline is in the third grade, and Amy joins the PTA. They are relentlessly normal, except that they are ready to leave the second their enemies find them.

Craig Benson pushes his daughters on the swings and helps with homework, waters the lawn, wears pink polo shirts. Fox Mulder, on the other hand, drives to Savannah to get pictures of his son playing with John Doggett, and comes home to a house full of Samanthas.

Maybe this is where his life has been heading all along, the inevitable conclusion to a single-minded search. Seek and ye shall find, etc, etc. He spent his whole life searching for Samantha, and he's found her three times over. Every day at the FBI, every case, every late night, every time he put himself or Scully in danger, it was all for her, and now he wakes up to a grown Samantha in bed beside him, his not-wife, two child Samanthas between them, having abandoned their own beds to nightmares.

The girls find it easy to pretend, calling them Daddy and Mommy unselfconsciously, almost seeming to forget none of it is real. He and grown-up Samantha-Jill-Amy have a harder time of it. He kisses her cheek awkwardly when they say goodbye in public, and fidgets with his new wedding ring absently when he's not paying attention. They talk about their pasts slowly, in fits and starts. She was a public interest lawyer - he tells her about the FBI. He can't help thinking of her as Samantha, how she would've turned out. He watches her, pays attention, greedy for details, and he knows she's aware of it. Her hair is curly, her nose shaped like his, her mouth like their mother's. She is lively and intelligent, when she's not terrified of gunmen in the night, and she has a dry sense of humor way too similar to his own. She is good with children.

She is not Samantha, he tries to tell himself - she is Jill, she is Amy. Someone entirely different. She is not Samantha.

She laughs exactly like she did as a little girl.

In pretending, this playing house, they begin to take on the rhythms of a married couple without meaning to. They go to parent-teacher conferences, they get the kids ready for school. She nags him to squeeze the toothpaste from the end, and occasionally he flashes back to him and Scully, undercover at Arcadia. But over the weeks, months, these flashes come less frequently. He and Samantha - AMY, he means - get a rhythm, a routine, stepping around each other in the kitchen, making coffee the way the other likes it. He catches her watching him out of the corner of her eye.

Everyone says how much their daughters look like their mother.

Celia, the youngest, the first Samantha, likes him to put her to bed. It always reminds him of those first couple of months, when it was just the two of them, when they were almost living in a beat-up Chevrolet, when they never stayed in one place more than a couple days. Tonight he reads her Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and she asks if they can move to Australia.

He laughs. "You never know."

"Good," she says, "I want to have a pet kangaroo."

"We'll see," he says, and kisses her forehead and pulls the covers up to her chin.

Downstairs, the other Samantha - Madeline, she's Madeline - is in tears because she doesn't know how to write a book report, and it's another ordinary day. Her not-mother puts her to bed, and he watches the headlines of the eleven o'clock news before he goes upstairs himself. Nothing bad has happened in Washington, DC today, no FBI agents have been hurt. That's good.

He slides under the covers next to his un-wife, lies on his back and thinks about Scully until he drifts asleep. This is how it is every day.

Except tonight, when he is in that space between sleeping and waking, only half-aware, Samantha rolls over so her body is pressed against him, warm and soft and sleepy, and she puts a hand on his chest, hot against his skin, and he's not awake, he's drifting, and her hand moves lower, slips inside his pajama pants, and he's almost dreaming, he thinks she's Scully, and he moans and when she touches his cock he jerks against her hand. She rubs him slowly and he's waking up a little more, and it's Samantha, Samantha, he should stop this, it's his sister, and just a second more and he will, it's just that her hand feels so good on him and it's been so long since anyone's touched him, and then she's putting one leg over him, straddling him, and he shuts his eyes.

He has sex with his sister with his eyes closed, and afterwards she kisses him and falls asleep on his chest, and he doesn't sleep, not the whole night.

The next morning she makes pancakes for breakfast instead of just cold cereal, humming something cheerful and smiling, and she's been in love with him this whole time. He should've told her, when he found her, told her she was his sister. Or, anyway, the clone of his sister. He should've told her.

He wonders if all this time, he's wanted this. He wants to throw up.

Instead he ties his tie and pours milk for littlest Samantha, and orange juice for medium Samantha, and wife Samantha gives them pancakes that are shaped like Mickey Mouse, and she kisses him on the lips and the girls giggle.

He drinks his coffee and reads the newspaper and can't bring himself to eat anything. He's still feeling queasy.

"Craig," Samantha says, and it takes him a second to remember that that's supposed to be him. "Do you have any one dollar bills for Maddie's lunch money? I meant to go to the bank yesterday but I forgot."

"I think so," he says, and can't look at her, pretends he's absorbed in the front page. "Check my wallet."

Littlest Samantha is talking about Dora the Explorer, and medium Samantha is teasing her, and he reads the story about DeLay's indictment four times without understanding it. He finally realizes that wife Samantha is standing very still, looking at his wallet.

"Everything okay?" he asks.

She blinks and looks up and nods slowly. "Who's this?" she says, and her voice is forced casual. She holds out a picture of Scully and William, the one where William's asleep on Scully's lap and the light's catching Scully's hair. Doggett took the picture.

Mulder blinks. The girls are fighting over the syrup. "Uh... my sister," he says finally. "And her son."

Samantha visibly relaxes, smiles again. "Oh," she says. "I didn't know you had a sister."

"Yeah," says Mulder. "I do." He reaches over and rescues the syrup from where the girls are threatening to spill it, and yes, he has a sister, she's everywhere. She's everywhere.


End file.
